Leveraged Loan Fund Outlfows Increase to $594M; 27th Straight Week

Cash outflows from bank loan funds increased to $594 million for the week ending Jan. 14, according to Lipper. That’s up from $374 million last week, but down from $1 billion two weeks ago, and $1.8 billion in the week ended Dec. 17, 2014.

The influence from exchange-traded funds picked up slightly week-over-week, at 4% of the redemption, or $26.4 million, versus just 1% of the redemption, or $2.3 million last week. Recall that ETFs were heavy, at 18% of the big withdrawal three weeks ago, and that was anomalous to most every other reading during the year.

The latest outflow represents the 27th consecutive weekly withdrawal and the 38th outflow in 39 weeks, for a net redemption of $25.2 billion over that span.

The $968 million outflow for the first two weeks of the year is in contrast to last year, which showed a net inflow of $2.1 billion. For the full-year 2014, outflows were roughly $17.3 billion, with ETFs representing about 3% of that total, or $516 million.

In today’s report, the change due to market conditions turned positive, at $152 million, for a 0.17% advance against total assets, which were $87.9 billion at the end of the observation period. The ETF segment comprises $6.8 billion of the total, or approximately 8%